One of the best things about working on Raspberry Pi has been the opportunity to meet groups of people who are trying to bring about the same sort of change in the teaching of other subjects that we’re aiming for in computing. One great example is the computer-based math(s) (CBM) movement, which aims to redefine the teaching of mathematics in schools away from mechanical calculation and towards problem solving. From their website:

The importance of math to jobs, society, and thinking has exploded over the last few decades. Meanwhile, math education is in worldwide crisis—diverging more and more from what’s required by countries, industry, further education… and students.

Computers are key to bridging this chasm: only when they do the calculating is math applicable to hard questions across many contexts. Real-life math has been transformed by computer-based calculation; now mainstream math education needs this fundamental change too.

computerbasedmath.org is the project to perform this reset. We’re building a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart, while campaigning at all levels to redefine math education away from historical hand-calculating techniques and toward real-life problem-solving situations that drive high-concept math understanding and experience.

Today, at the CBM education summit in New York, we announced a partnership with Wolfram Research to bundle a free copy of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language into future Raspbian images. We believe this will make the Pi a first-class platform for teaching CBM techniques to children of all ages. As Conrad Wolfram said today: “Coders will be able to use the power of Mathematica’s maths out of the box, not only enriching what they can do but also showing off the power and importance of maths.”

Plotting 3d graphs with Mathematica on Pi

Deeply inappropriate use of the Heaviside step function

Future Raspbian images will ship with the Wolfram Language and Mathematica by default; existing users with at least 600MB of free space on their SD card can install them today by typing:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wolfram-engine

You’ll find Mathematica in the app launcher under the Education menu.

We’d like to thank the team at Wolfram Research for the enormous amount of effort they’ve put to get the Wolfram Language and Mathematica running well on the Pi. Over the next few months we’ll be running a series of blog posts from Wolfram exploring some of the neat tricks you can get up to with them. This is going to be fun!

Or you could provide an actual free and open source toolkit like Sage or Octave which avoids locking in your users into a proprietary environment. I really feel the Raspberry Pi Foundation should be pushing for more use of open source software rather than less.

But you are free to choose not to use it, so in the end it´s you the one who will make the decision and accept the consequences. What´s more – you could even choose to build your own FOSS version and give if for free (or not) to the world.
Isn´t that what freedom is about?

And your everlasting soul — it’s right at the end of the million page EULA.

P.S. Just in case anyone thinks that I’m serious (you’d be surprised :)) I’m not. You don’t have to download it. You’re not even obliged to buy a Pi. It’s pretty simple: we are saying, “Here’s something cool and useful and free”. Isn’t that fantastic? :D

P.P.S. While I’m here in mod mode: anyone who would like to further discuss FOSS, freedom, Dante’s 9 circles of hell etc etc please pop across to our forums. Here is not the place.

Tell me about it! I downlaoded it last night and woke up to find myslf bound with gaffer tape in the trunk of a car. I’m writing this in the dakk on a chamois leather in my own tears so apolgies for any typos.

And all just because I wanted to explre the Lucas numbers.

Update: I have just been released by a coachload of woad-smeared Scotsmen at Pease Pottage services. Phew.

But I’d like to point out that there is also an OS alternative to Mathematica, It is provided by the SAGE project.
It is a bundle of symbolic computation software, mainly in C with python glue.

From the educatioonal point of view I would rather see this supported on the PI for the following reasons:
— it was created and it is maintained by mathematicians for mathematicians and the general public
— you have the source code, and can check it or learn how symbolic computation is made under the hood.

Have you ever actually compared Mathematica and SAGE, putting aside the FOSS argument for a moment? The two are not actually particularly alike – I don’t think I’d call SAGE an “alternative”, but it is a FOSS *option* for those wanting to do symbolic computation – and, of course, Mathematica’s usual pricing structure has pushed a lot of people in SAGE’s direction. Mathematica’s definitely the better option in terms of usability (for beginners, it’s got a fantastically shallow learning curve), consistency and sensibleness of syntax; although we do, of course, respect the fact that some of you are committed to using FOSS only. (I do agree that seeing the source code would be a nice-to-have – but again, it’s only a nice-to-have for a tiny minority of our users. You and I are not representative of most of the learners who have a Raspberry Pi.)

As we always say to people with a particular piece of open source software they want to see on the Pi: it’s in your hands. Get a team together. Do the work to port it. Wolfram did that with a piece of commercial software, they did it for free, and we’re very grateful to them; they’ve provided kids learning with the Pi with yet another tool. We want to make access to tools available for as many learners as possible. If we can work with someone like Wolfram to provide commercial learning software like this for free, that’s a huge win for us, and it’s an enormous win for the community.

Liz, I do appreaciate the work all of you have done and also the excellent work of Wolfram in providing Mathematica for the Pi. Perhaps I did not express myself clearly enough. I did not meant to criticise an excellent choice made by the foundation (Note i did not add my comments on a previous negative post). Of course the Mathematica interface is at the moment more usable and user friendly, and it will propbably run much faster, since it has been ported. In this sense, for the ease of use they are not comparable. For quality and educational purpose they are.

Far from me the idea to provoke a flame war here, I do appreaciate all the excellent work done by you and the foundation.

However I would like to see Sage actively supported on the Pi, and yes, I shall try to put together some volunteeer do do it myself….. Anyway , I shall stop here and transfer any followup on the Forum.
Thank you for listening
Andrea

..you should package it too, most people running raspian on dinky toy cards, don’t have the disk space handy for build tools, and the RPI doesn’t really have the omph to build it from your git tree, unless you get it running on the graphics chip instead of on the cpu.

This is great.
As a Math teacher I used to struggle showing functions to students.
I now work with college interns who have limited math skills. We use Raspberry Pi to model server rooms, wind farms, power grids. This will really help to provide skills to students who need them.

Thanks. I will see if I can reproduce the issue on one of my machines. The package isn’t really marked as en-us in anyway way, so I don’t thing the language would be an issue.

That said, I have seen this behavior before in LXDE sporadically. You could try using “xdg-desktop-menu forceupdate” This may be time consuming, but if nothing else works, re-installing the package could help there.

You can visit the Wolfram community at the link on my name here and post about this and I’ll do what I can to figure out what’s wrong. Sorry for the trouble so far!

i didn’t get the ‘Mathematica’ menu icone, either. neither the ‘lxpanelctl restart’ nor ‘xdg-desktop-menu forceupdate’ worked for me, until i edited the .desktop file. after that the forceupdate correctly installed the menu item.

I had the same problem. I fixed it by editing /use/share/applications/wolfram-language.desktop. In the “Categories” property, take out “Education”. Afterwards, run xdg-desktop-menu forceupdate. Maybe lxde doesn’t like the “Icon” property being the same???

I totally agree that it is AWESOME to have Mathematica on th Pi. Years ago I learned Mathematica at the university and got myself a student version. Never since then, cause it was way too expensive for a private use. Even when the price for private use dropped to something about 300 € I resisted. Why use a tool when you can not share your findings.
But hey, now it makes sense again. I think toying around with mathematica is a perfect reason to get a Pi for.

Basically, it’s free for non-commercial use on a Raspberry Pi specifically. Running it on any other device requires a license.

Mathematica applications and packages are not really compiled into device-specific code, so you could certainly do development on a desktop version of Mathematica and run the software on the Pi (or have the two Notebooks communicate with each other directly). It’s largely an interpreted language, so cross-compilation isn’t beneficial or necessary for all but very esoteric uses (like linking with C libraries).

I’m no lawyer, but that sounds like a perfectly valid way to use a network transparent user frontend. In fact, we encourage doing “remote development” through mathematica on the desktop (Mathematica has a very robust remote kernel architecture). If you don’t have desktop Mathematica, remote X is a great idea.

Mathematica is an wonderful addition to the selection of Pi software. At our university and other universities I’m familiar with, Maple, is preferred, mostly due to the cost effectiveness of university site licenses. I read the license agreement from the link you posted. And was wondering about item f under limitations:

“f. allowing access to the Product by any user other than Licensee, including, without limitation, access to the Product via a web server, which is only allowed pursuant to a valid webMathematica™ license agreement;”

I would like to know whether Mathematica could be used by students at a private school in a computing lab equipped with Raspberry Pi’s. Also what about in an after school computing club with a small enrollment fee?

I ask because the license appears to be a single user license. Are there other site license arrangements needed for using Mathematica on a Raspberry Pi in, for example, a private or Catholic school?

I think Mathematica makes a wonderful programming language for doing mathematics and am very interested on an economical way to bring this into schools.

That’s so awesome! I’m in the middle of moving as well as transporting my “maker-lab”, and once I am done in the next week I can’t wait to get going more in the Pilot version, hopefully that will get me ready for the full release!

Thanks again Wolfram and Raspberry Pi, this move itself is huge progress!

I have lusted for Mathematica since college in the 1960’s, but the price was always too high. This news is particularly great because I plan to show some of my colleagues at the community college where I work about the Raspberry Pi in January and Mathematica will certainly be part of the demonstration.

This is fantastic good news! I have remarked before that I would have committed serious crimes to have these tools (Mathematica, Labview, for instance) as an undergraduate. Pencil and slide rule do slow one down.

Computer-based maths saved my university career. I would always know the right techniques to apply, but for $reasons I’d never get quite the right result down at the end of those huge strength of materials problems. When I discovered that one of the computer labs had a symbolic maths system on it, I taught myself how to use it and managed to fly through assignments and exams with no frustration. I ended up showing some of the professors how to use it, as they’d never seen it before.

I purchased my Raspberry Pi Friday and am downloading Mathematica now, if you need help for the Mathematica section let me know as I am taking pictures of everything that happens after the configuration part, after where you have to tab through to select “Ok”.

Or…if you are accepting volunteers to help document it, I would love to say I was a part of it! Thanks and awesome job!- James Pray

I’ve been using the Mathematica beta for the Pi in my educational work since it was first offered and couldn’t be a happier little clam. As some have noted, the drudgery of doing mechanical things such as calculation, plotting, etc., often derails students from understanding the CONCEPTS underlying the math(s). We should all recall that Albert Einstein failed arithmetic and couldn’t get hired as a professor to save his life, and thank goodness for that, or he’d have been too busy dealing with administrivia to let his mind wander and ponder important imponderables. He would have loved a tool like Mathematica on an educational platform such as the Pi, and so should you.

SAGE will be great to have too, when (I hope not if) the resources are applied to port it to the Pi. The more, the Raspberrier, I always say! :D

Thanks! Over 500,000 Google hits that say he couldn’t do arithmetic can’t all be wrong, can they? :D I wasn’t talking about mathemetics in general, but doing the boring mechanics of arithmetic calculation. Whatever the truth about his arithmetic abilities is, he still couldn’t get hired as a beginning professor because he couldn’t perform the mundane administrivia required by people starting out in that profession – which includes simple arithmetic.

We can all be quite thankful of that because the patent clerk job that he finally was able to be hired for gave him plenty of time to stare out the window at things like a clock tower across the town and posit his thought experiments about time, the speed of light, and everything that extends from those two quite simple, yet complex, phenomena.

BTW, for anyone not familiar with the area of mathematics concerned with groups, fields, rings, etc., you might be shocked/awed/fascinated by the fact that all of the arithmetic operations we’ve grown to love/hate are based on assumptions … that can be changed. So, things like the additive identity (zero) and the multiplicative identity (one) that don’t change an original value when operating upon any other number, can be changed to any other value you might want. That blows everything you know about arithmetic completely out of the water, but it’s very useful when dealing with very odd things like quantum mechanics.

In any case, mathematics is fun, even if it means having to rewrite incorrect mathematical history! ;)

Why, yes, yes it can! Symmetrical, assymetrical, spherical … pretty much any form you might conjure up. You do have to be careful about how big things like matrices can become, though, as memory consumption can quickly exhaust resources if you don’t use optimized Mathematica syntax (as in any computational endeavo(u)r). That’s another reason why I love the Pi – it forces one to operate within its constraints and use its resources efficiently – something we all used to have to do.

We just began demoing our 1960-vintage IBM 1401 mainframe (complete with tape drives, keypunches, and punched-card reader!) at the Computer History Museum and we have to really think before we run anything that hasn’t already been optimized. This is an example of the difference between education and mere training.

there is information about cluster configuration here http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ParallelTools/tutorial/ConnectionMethods.html
it won’t be a fast way to use mathematica and you would have to find a bigish problem that lends itself to parallelisation, however it would be fun and educational to try (which is the point – if you wanted fast, you have come to the wrong place) I am very tempted to set this up on the cluster I am building.

That is, unless you’re from the more sensible New World, where we take such frumpiness as an opportunity to morph, transmogrify, and otherwise mangle such fuddy-duddy thinking. Otherwise, you’d all be using ridiculosities that would be the British version of Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän, which in English means “Danube Steamship Company Captain”.

I couldn’t find mathematica-engine using sudo apt-get install. The only mathematica-related package i found was mathematica-fonts. I then downloaded this “.deb”-file from http://repository.wolfram.com/raspbian/pool/non-free/w/wolfram-engine/ but then sudo dpkg -i says it’s not a debian format archive and refuses to install. I use Raspbian from latest NOOBS and it’s most updated and upgraded. I also installed mathematica-fonts and then tried dpkg -i but with the same error. I guess I just have to wait until Mathematica is in the Raspbian repository. It’s strange that many people claim to have installed it.

Hi guys, I am a mathematician and have been thinking of creating educational applications with Mathematica for quite a while now. So glad to see this happen. I only have a question: I am totally new to the whole Raspberry-Pi thing. I noticed there are some variations of the kit. Which one of the models do you think I should get for trying Mathematica on?

This is wonderful news! … I cannot comprehend all the nay-saying in these comments.

May I ask…When will the SD cards with Mathematica already on them be in stock at the distributors..approximately?

I am a ‘newbie’ and have been waiting to buy a few RPis as seasonal gifts for friends and myself. Am not so confident of my ability to effectively do the downloads at this stage, so would rather purchase with it M included.

I am also interested in wondering when I can get a copy. I have already downloaded the OS for the pi. Anyone have any instructions they can post for those of us that have already downloaded but would like to get Mathematica?

This is unbelievable news for a STEM teacher/math geek like me. (In the US we say “math.” Sorry.) Started downloading it last night and went to sleep. In the morning, no Mathematica anywhere. Just tried it on another SD card (with Google Coder on it) and I get an error message:

After this operation, 588 MB of additional disk space will be used.
E: You don’t have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/.

Worked on the second install try on another SD card (this one only 8GB!) No icon for Mathematica anywhere, but thank you to the poster who advised to enter “mathematica” in the command line. Works fine!

It took me some time to discover that you need to use the right arrow to highlight and press return in order to accept the license statement. Making Mathematica available in this way is a major step forward to make advanced numerical and symbolic processing available to pupils and students.

I like Pi. I installed Mathematica last night. I have been in love with Mathematica since my student version X^2 years ago. But if you are interested in a quick easy CBM learning tool try Microsoft Mathematics. A free download for Windozs.

I tried to install using the apt-get command mentioned (cut and paste)… when lengthy license agreement terms appear, there is no way to accept, decline or continue somehow. STUCK!
Worse, dpkg –configure -a does not heal it … any attempt to invoke apt-get brings back the wolframs license terms garbage again. Got to get rid of it!

The MathKernel (typing ‘wolfram’ from the terminal) works great! Unfortunately, trying to run mathematica over ssh (with the -X flag) causes a segfault for me. Valgrind says this is due to an illegal instruction. Regardless, the MathKernel solved an equation that WolframAlpha repeatedly “timed-out” with, even with the extended time, just about instantaneously! Unfortunately, the solution is more-or-less unreadable without a GUI.

Hit the TAB key to select the “OK” message at the bottom of the first license screen, then hit the ENTER key. That will move you to the next screen where you will actually “accept” the license agreement. There are options for “YES” and “NO” at the bottom of the second screen. Choose your option by using the TAB key, then press ENTER to select.